


As For the Morning

by Grimmy88



Category: Left 4 Dead 2
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-26
Updated: 2013-11-26
Packaged: 2018-01-02 17:05:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,357
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1059372
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Grimmy88/pseuds/Grimmy88
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sad, angsty fic ahead.</p>
            </blockquote>





	As For the Morning

            There’s a sock on the window sill.

            It’s literally hanging there, somehow, taunting him from the very corner of the window—caught on a tiny thread or otherwise. It’s fairly dirty as well, it’s bottom where smudged patches of gray reside complimented by one little fleck of red something or other in which its owner had stepped.

            The entire room compliments this highlight with more splatterings of ridiculous filth and displacement here and there, a mockery of artistic style, maybe.

            There are more clothes hard pressed and clinging to the floor they’ve inhabited for the time span of no less than a month. Some of these lead to the mirror-crowned drawers against the back wall. A red t-shirt drapes and hangs in dramatic folds from one such drawer while the remainder juxtapose between those open and disheveled and those stoically closed.

            The other trail of clothes leads to the closet which has been shut over them despite their tenacious stubbornness bunched out from underneath. In fact the doors are hard to get open without a swift jerk and a loud groan from the joints and bolts themselves.

            Few clothes hang in the space—even more litter the floor around the blue hamper in which they belong. Those that do hang do so crookedly upon their hangers, pathetic and rumpled save for the few dress shirts and slacks within.

            It’s all very reminiscent of a twelve year old’s room right down to the numerous posters hiding the paint of the walls. There’s the staples—the Midnight Riders, Jimmy Gibbs Jr., some random images that belong to video games.

            There are also pictures taken at various points in time, of him, of them. They are strikingly appealing by smiles and joy lines. They are touching in each of them, touching or not together at all.

            There’s an image of them together beside the bed. It’s not clear now what exactly sparked the events of the picture—the words he thinks are associated are from very long ago, but he remembers a party and a gift given, a photo snapped.

            Now the result stands, smiles ecstatic and emphatic respectively, stuck in time for him. Stuck next to that bed as if its owner always wanted to look at it upon waking.

            But the bed is still made as it is and has been every day.

            Ellis had never slept in it. He’d never needed it.

 

            Nick has been in a room like this more than ten times. He figures once you get to the point when a number arises above the ability to count on one hand’s fingers the default explanation when asked is ‘more than ten times.’

            If he said twenty-four that would just look suspicious, after all.

            Not that he needs to tell the two police sitting with him. They’ve pulled out his files, they’ve seen his crimes and both the money and time he’s paid for them.

            So they question him.

            And normally he’d be snarky, he’d give them shit, he’d be pissed he was even there.

            Now, however, he can only feel the prickling of fatigue at the back of his eyeballs.

            “How long did you say it was?”

            “Seven years,” Nick answers. He’s staring at a protruding blob of paint, bulbous and irksome in the way it swells from the bricked wall.

            “You’d never been with a man before that?”

            The one asking him the questions is the younger, slimmer of the two. The conman thinks the other must be some sort of homophobe. His sneer is always in Nick’s peripheral but never there whenever he turns his focus on it.

            “No,” Nick says.

            “But you were married to a woman before?” Fatty asks, and he may only be a little pudgy but the nickname sounds better than his tag’s ‘Michelson’ in the gambler’s mind.

            “Yes.”

            “Did you have anything other than domestic problems with her?”

            “Are there any reports?”

            “No.”

            “There’s your answer.” Nick turns back to inspecting the paint. They should really smooth it over.

            “But you two divorced,” Fatty continues with the obvious.

            “Yeah. We both wanted one.”

            “And things were okay with Ellis?”

            Things were great. “Yeah.”

            “Any allergies, medical problems you were aware of?”

            “No,” Nick says, honestly. The kid had never mentioned anything. He’d always been indestructible as far as anybody could tell. “But his mother would know better than me.”

            “You didn’t bother to learn these things about the man you’ve been with for seven years?”

            There probably had been nothing to learn regarding health. There’d been so much more to learn about everything else. Like the way Ellis’ hair curled immediately upon drying from a shower. Like the way they both liked their eggs sunny-side up. Like the way his spine had curved during sex.

            And he’d been content to relearn all of those things but Fatty didn’t need to know it.

            And he was pretty drained of both energy and words right about now.

            “Are there charges being pressed against me?” he asks.

            “No,” the young cop replies.

            “Is someone accusing me?”

            “No.”

            “Then I’m leaving,” Nick declares.

            Annalynne is outside the tiny room in which he’d been stored. She rushes to his side and her hand is thick, soft, and warm in his own.

            “I told them you’d never do anything,” she says. Her face is pink and puffed in alarming acceleration around and downwards from her eyes.

 

            He’d been rubbing his cheek, his stubble against the smooth of Ellis’ stomach, right above his navel for some time. He’d gotten an accidental elbow to the head from the ticklish redneck before too long, of course. It had encouraged him to switch to using his tongue, lavishing and full and then prodding with the tip into each dip of the younger man’s skin.

            It hadn’t been so funny then, even if the smile had remained.

            Likewise there had been no prodding to get the shirt peeled away, nor his boxers. Nick had let him without comment or even acknowledgement. He’d continued his path around the muscles beneath him, mouthing and rubbing and slow, unsure of what he wanted to do beyond those touches at that moment.

            Ellis had waited; patient fingers had been cradling the spaces behind his ears.

            It’d helped to make up Nick’s mind to kiss him on the mouth, full and sealed tight by all the weight he’d leant into it. When his lover’s arms had come about him, curled about him, sealed about him—one took his neck and a cupped palm claimed his face—he’d reached down and encouraged the flesh between them to attention. He’d stroked, pulled with only three fingers—pressed hard when he knew he should and relaxed light when he knew he could.

            Ellis had sucked at his mouth, drank from him, breathed from him in desperate little gasps and the charming expansion of his torso. It hadn’t ceased nor changed alongside their position. The mechanic continued the exchanging pressures of their lips even from his kneeled pose over Nick’s thighs.

            They had rocked slow like that, eyes barely opened and no longer than a few seconds at a time.

            When they came the closeness still hadn’t changed. Nick had let the weight rest there too as long as the kid (even if he wasn’t a kid anymore) wanted.

            His partner had drawn back after several moments, smiled, and eased the tightness of his grip. “Love ya.”

            “I know it,” Nick had assured.

            And there’d been a beat, a frown. “Yer supposed’ta say it back.”

            “Why?” He’d only asked because it’d been a request the redneck had never made before then.

            Ellis hadn’t possessed an answer for the two of them.

            So Nick had said, “You already know it.” He hadn’t needed to say it.

            It probably hadn’t been the best thing to say and so he certainly hadn’t expected to be rewarded with a pleased, brilliant smile.

 

            There are several pairs of eyes glaring at him. They’d started off in a torrent when the doors to the parlor had opened. He’d gotten one or two curt nods but beyond that all he does now is stand alone at the foot of the coffin. he isn’t sure where else to go, especially without his lover acting as his foil.

            There’s a board of pictures behind him—a collage of youth and charm, a combo of humility and zeal. Nothing about it is progressive save for the crescendo of sweetness that excels as he scales through them. Otherwise they jump back and forth between ages, expressions, and the maturity of the actions contained within.

            He takes one—a red-cheeked boy on Christmas morning, all gapped teeth and cow-licked hair. He doesn’t remember having seen it before. He wonders if he should have. He wonders if anyone else, besides Annalynne and his grandfather, has.

            Nick takes another without replacing the first. He’s in this one with Ellis. It’s some random thing that had been taken without prompting or recognition. It shows on the older man’s doppelganger whom stares out at him from his profile with a small question in the form of slightly parted lips.

            Ellis, who’d been the aware picture-taker grins up into the shot from where his chin rests on the gambler’s shoulder. Nick thinks about the bridge of his nose and the crinkles around his eyes, and the way his tight jaw meets to create the cleft in his chin.

            He pockets it and doesn’t think about the glare aunt Darla or whatever-the-fuck gives.

            Annalynne finds him then, puts a gentle touch at his elbow and leads him around the room towards food and drink but he isn’t very hungry or thirsty and none of it will taste good anyway, nothing has.

            When she leads him to a seat he lets himself fall into it because suddenly his legs don’t want the burden of keeping him up anymore. His shoulders agree into their own slump.

            She asks to see the pictures he’s taken and he shows her, only now feeling guilty. She smiles at them, sets the Christmas picture down, and traces her thumb over a space on the other. A space Nick is sure is Ellis’ face.

            “I don’t remember it,” he explains.

            “Being taken, y’mean?”

            “He was always putting that damn camera in my face. I figured he just deleted them all.”

            “He didn’t,” she explains.

 

            Coach and Rochelle had taken up at the back of the helicopter, cluttered against the wall in their sleep. Although it was more likely their bodies gave out instead of inhabiting actual slumber.

            Ellis hadn’t bothered to sit down. He’d pressed his face towards the small windows, hands prone at his sides. One of his elbows had been bleeding from an obnoxious cut and the blood had followed the curve of his arm to his palm.

            “Rest your legs,” Nick had advised.

            “Can’t even feel ‘em,” had been his answer.

            “All the more reason.”

            Ellis turned to him, a small smile Nick had never seen before—but would continue to see—small and sweet, swerved gently within his face, accenting his youth, accenting how much of a boy he still was, he might always be.

            He’d said: “No, I mean I can’t feel ‘em ‘cause I can’t believe we made it.”

            “Ye of little faith,” Nick had mocked, more himself than the kid. He’d been the recipient of a smile so the joke had been understood.

            “We were up against a lot, s’what I mean,” Ellis’ voice had continued holding the conversation even as his eyes had given up contact. “An’ sometimes I wasn’t so sure…”

            “You?”

            “Well, the time that witch gotchya,” Ellis had said, “thoughtch’ya were a goner… Or when that Hunter got me when I was alone. Oh an’ remember the time when we ran on that coaster an’ that Charger came—…”

            “Yeah, I remember,” Nick snapped. He hadn’t wanted to hear the story for the fifth time, particularly because it had involved him hanging single handedly from a rail until Ellis had carted his ass up.

            “We really are a good team.”

            He’d sat next to the conman then and the lengths of their arms had touched.

 

            They’re sitting on her porch on the swing. The dog is at their feet, flattened against the wood and motionless as everything else. They each have a glass of lemonade perspiring in the cradle of their hands. It’s Annalynne’s concoction and it’s as sweet as it’s always been.

            “The last thing he said to me,” she says and smiles with glistened eyes: “’G’night, mom. I love ya. Try’n get more’n three hours’a sleep this time, okay?’”

            Her accent is perfect in imitation and it doesn’t matter that the octave is off because it makes him laugh and something in his chest crumple.

            He thinks back to that last night. Those last words and that last smile. He wonders if the latter had meant the former had been enough.

            He wonders if he’ll ever regret them because he finds now that he doesn’t. He finds he can’t think of any way he might’ve said it. He’d never said it to his ex, to his parents, to anybody, after all.

            But he’d never lived with his ex for seven years. He’d never spent time outside of sex with her when he didn’t have to, really. And he’ll never feel the same soft, yearning ache for her that he’s feeling now.

            He feels regret for her; for spending time on her, for spending money on her, for letting her imprint on his life, for knowing her and giving her influence over his emotions.

            And that last one—he wonders if he’ll regret Ellis—for letting him imprint, for knowing him and giving him control over his emotions, for that dullness he’ll carry just like the pictures he’d taken.

            Because right now he doesn’t.

            He sips his drink and asks, “What did you do when your husband…?” He doesn’t want to say the word yet.

            She coaxes a smile out again. “It was different. I had Ellis.”

            Nick drains the lemonade before agreeing: “Company helps.”

            He takes her hand and squeezes.


End file.
